I will be presenting the “Misplaced Women?” project at the BE.BOP 2018 in London, on a panel hosted by ABP Autograph & Tate Britain, on June 12. For information on dates, venues & programming, please visit the following website:

In the frame of Tanja Ostojić´s “Misplaced Women?” workshop hosted by Live Arts Development Agency London, on December 13 & 14, 2016, Dagmara Bilon realised 3 performance interventions which she has called “embodiedinvestigations intohome and identity; a protest against becoming a silenced and isolated as wallpaper, dedicatedto the ever-changing landscape of London in the mist of gentrification.”

For my first intervention I chose to unpack my heavy back-pack on a street corner in Hackney Wick near the neighborhood’s formerly longest occupied squat. I took of my heavy rucksack from my back and start to unpack. It’s full of various objects, accumulated over time: my childhood toys, my children’s toys, things I need for work, such as gaffe-tape, iPad, mobile phone, cigarettes, wire, lots of stones to ground me, so as not to fly away, a black fabric sphere that symbolised the veil of grief for the loss of my father, white pieces of fabric that I use to collect my menstrual blood, pens, pencils, a toy-snake. As I unpack my bag it feels never ending. Bits and pieces of glitter, receipts, notes… Lots and lots of junk, but to me – a trail of my existence. All the objects are bare on the wet concrete floor. While I see them, I feel uncertain of my survival, slightly embarrassed, like a public emptying of the bowels, spilling of my organs. I don’t dare to look into anyone’s eyes;I start to pack my bag as quickly as I possibly can, stuffing things back inside my dirty old rucksack. But there is always something more, always something else spilling out…

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My second performance featured a surreal procession of a displaced female body in a red suitcase, walking in black high heels and black velvet tight leggings over a Bridge in Olympic Park, that leads to London’s biggest shopping mall,Westfield Stratford. In the morning on that day, I took my large red suitcase from my room that contains all my dresses and props from previous London performances. This is when the performance started. I carried the suitcase from my room in South East London to Hackney,down the stairs, down the road, and on public transport. While walking I’m reminiscing of my immigrationat the age of three with my mother from Poland to Germany, with one and only suitcase filled with our possessions. In my associations of a single woman standing by a bus stop with a big red suitcase, symbolises vulnerability danger, but also power. The power to move on. As I travel I notice the eyes of people peeking and then quickly shifting back onto their daily newspaper or smart phone.

Then, standing by a bridge together with the group of participants from the “Misplaced Woman?” workshop. I open my suitcase and hand my items one by one to individuals in the group. To me this is a most humane and kind experience. To have my items held by others. I take off my golden sandals and step inside my black high heel shoes and through the two holes I have cut in the red suitcase. I squeeze my body into the suitcase and ask a volunteer from the group to lock the suitcase and point me straight over the bridge. I’m inside now, locked in. I can’t see where I am going. My legs are wobbly. The core of my body contorted. I want to speak: “am I going into the right direction?” — but I don’t have a voice ‘in there’, inside the suitcase. Spontaneously, a member of the group directs me how to walk forwards. I feel even more powerless, cut off and disorientated. I have no choice but to follow instructions and to focus on my feet, to stay on the ground and continue moving forward.

For my third performance, I shared an intervention with three women from the “Misplaced Woman?” workshop at Hackney Wick Overground Station. I chose to locate myself on the other side of the platform. It was not ideal for documenting the action. I deliberately wanted to experience the gap between us and the feeling of loosing side of each other as trains move in and out of the platform.

The last time I saw my father was on the other side of a platform in 1985.

I place my red suitcase on the floor and slowly unpack all my dresses and props from previous London performances. Each of them with a story to tell, the dust of previous locations, the smell of sweat or dump, and leave a trace of these items around me that for a sort of island.

I’m standing in the middle of the island and at last pull out a huge Cunt Sculpture. I stand up on the bench “on my island” and hold up my Cunt up high. A train comes into the platform. People are going in and out. A man takes a picture from within the train. The doors are closing. The train moves out again.

I step off the bench, pack up my suitcase again and as I walk over to the other side of the platform to join the others, a mother with a baby looks at me beaming and asks if it was a vagina that I was holding up?

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Text written by Dagmara Bilon

Edited by Tanja Ostojić and Danyel Ferreri

Photos featured in this post taken by the “Misplaced Women?” workshop participants, London, and Aleksandar Utjesinovic

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Dagmara Bilon (b.1981) is a London based Polish/German Performance Artist, Co-Founder of The Purple Ladies Performance Collective, Artist Mentor on The Talking Gender Project and Project Manager of The MotherHouse. Since graduating in 2003 from Trinity Laban with a degree in Dance Theater she has worked as a performer for companies such as Punchdrunk, Psychological Art Circus, The Bones Theater, Marissa Carnesky, Ear Cinema and Lundahl&Seitl. Simultaneously she created and produced her own independent performance projects including staged works, sight specific interventions and one to one performances. More recently she focused on developing performance actions that challenge the notions of motherhood and identity and exhibited work alongside The Desperate Art Wives. She has also conducted various community arts led projects engaging young people in the discourse of gender, sexuality and identity. www.dagmarabilon.com

Alice Tuppen-Corps unpacked her suitcase on December 14 2016 and created the Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home Performance in Hackney Wick London, in the frame of “Misplaced Women?” performance workshop lead by Tanja Ostojić, hosted by LADA.

Alice’s research investigates how specific forms of encounter with individual stories and personal objects can act as enabling agents, transforming the emotional, psychological and creative experience of worlds. In this piece, ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home’, the artist took possessions from her own home to include: a portrait of herself aged four years old, an Eiffel Tower gifted to her in Paris by a lover, her broken wedding ring, two lion hats, a whip, a box of matches and a spikey golden hedgehog.

Foremost a filmmaker, (as well as and significantly here a divorcee), Alice experienced the first day of the workshop with Tanja as a ‘watcher’. She absorbed the performances of others whilst waiting for the moment it felt right for her to perform. That moment came in the early hours of the following morning, inspired by the place she encountered as her ‘home for the night’, an artist’s squat in the East End of London.

‘Alice walked in. She was welcomed, perturbed even, by a new world of waiting objects: a guillotine, two dressmaker’s dummies, broken pots, old papers, a crumpled bed. Placing her suitcase on the floor she took off her hat, coat, shoes and she dressed the two dressmaker’s dummies that confronted her. Arranging her portrait amongst the other pictures on the wall she laid out her own vessels, four little dishes and a Van Gogh teddy bear. Alice infiltrated the space through the slow positioning of her objects. She embodied the space as she integrated her objects with those of the absent ‘host’, in this way she re-storyed herself into a new place of belonging. Alice made the squat her home. The two dummies became her ‘animated’ roommates. She re-worked these characters as symbolic of others she had, lost, left, displaced by her leaving her own home and former relationships. Seeing the characters before her, changed and enlivened by her interventions, she saw others and herself more clearly. As the dummies spoke back to with such autobiographical agency, Alice accessed and activated memories that allowed her to reposition herself. She became placed.

Alice documented the process and re-performed the ‘unpacking’ of the suitcase to a live audience at LADA that evening and in dialogue with onscreen photographs of the objects when in-situ at the squat. In the live, audiences were dressed by Alice and given offerings from the case to ‘care for’, one audience member said that ‘she felt a transformative wave flow over her, issuing out from the performer, touching the audience and drawing them into the co-generation of a [third space], simultaneously journeying inward to self, outward towards performer and across to the screen’.

Alice Tuppen-Corps is a practice-based Ph.D. Researcher and Digital Performance Lecturer at De Montfort University. She was trained at Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Fine Art with a background in Broadcast and Media Production, Higher Education and Arts Psychotherapy. She is a Ph.D. practice-based researcher and artist based in the East Midlands.

She is principally investigating ‘Digital Performance and the Feminine: Transformational Encounters’. In her artistic practice she filmically re-stages individual stories within augmented, networked and tactile environments in order to generate new qualities of reflective space that empower transformation, contemplation and connection. Bracha Ettinger’s concept of ‘Carriance’ is theoretically foreground, allowing ‘the other’ to be ‘within me [him/her] charged’. Alice adopts Ettinger’s concept of ‘Thinking (M) otherwise’ (2006) and performatively facilitates her participants to co-create within matrixial spaces of technological, sculptural, filmic and relational aesthetics. Like a ‘Mobius Strip’, her artworks reciprocally and affectively touch back and within such artistic carriance structures, a hopeful and restorative dance is activated in self and other regardless of sexual or gender identification. www.alicetuppencorps.com

On October 12 2016. Bojana Videkanić was holding the “Misplaced Women?” sign on the Pearson International Airport in Toronto and was diving into her profoundly touching memories about her initiation into the life of a refugee escaping Sarajevo siege in 1992 and her and her family life as refuges in the UK, Croatia and Canada. She wrote about it:

Missing Women: Some Thoughts As to Why I Became Missing While Waiting for Tanja Ostojić

By Bojana Videkanić October 2016-February 2017.

Last year I invited Tanja Ostojić to present her work at the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival in Toronto. As one of the members of the Toronto Performance Art Collective, I have been wanting to invite Tanja to come to our festival for some time. She generously accepted and came in October 2016. In our conversations and planning prior to her arrival, Tanja asked me to help her by doing a specific action when she landed in Toronto. She asked me to create a sign and hold it while waiting for her at the Pearson International Airport. She told me that the sign should read: “Misplaced Women” which is also the title of Tanja’s piece that she was going to perform on October 16 at a tram stop downtown Toronto at the corner of McCaul and Dundas streets. Tanja gave me a choice to, if I wanted to, put a question mark at the end of the statement. I was happy to do the action and I made the sign, deciding to put a question mark at the end. My choice to do so was guided by the fact that Pearson is a large and busy place and I suspected that the sign will be noticed if I keep it ambiguous. I, however, was not considering the impact Tanja’s work would have on me.

The day came and I arrived 30 or so minutes earlier in order to keep the action a bit longer, to give it some time to play out. While standing there at the international arrivals gate, I had some time to think about the action I was performing (standing in the middle of the great airport hall with an ambiguous sign in my hands) and what its ramifications might be. There were a couple of important thoughts I had that came about as a result. First, throughout my action I realized that I was initiating Tanja’s performance, as it became obvious that my interactions with the accidental audiences were a catalyst for a discussion around borders, policing of bodies, and (in)visible violence of that. In short, I realized that Tanja’s performance has begun as people gawked at me. Secondly, I realized the echoes of Tanja’s work in our ‘local’ Canadian context with the missing and murdered indigenous women, and the impact it had in the light of Syrian crisis and the inability of the world actors to see the refugees as human beings. What I did not expect was my own physical reaction to the sign and the moment as I became missing in it.

On October 12 2016, Bojana Videkanić holding the “Misplaced Women?” sign on the Pearson International Airport in Toronto and diving into her profoundly touching memories about her initiation into the life of a refugee escaping Sarajevo siege in 1992 and her and her family life as refuges in the UK, Croatia and Canada. Photo: Tanja Ostojić

It became obvious at that moment that the sign “Missing Women” was not about some other missing women (although of course it is about many thousands if not millions of them) but that it was also about my own experiences of borders and violence. It brought me back some 20+ years back to 1992, and my 15-year-old self, a confused, frightened child who, in a matter of few weeks between April 6 and April 20 1992, became a refugee. At the time I did not know what that meant, but I learned quickly. When my hometown of Sarajevo came under siege and the first grenades fell, my desperate, naïve parents wanted to save me, to protect me, so they found a way to put me on one of the last planes leaving the city to go to Belgrade and then on to London, England. I will never forget the scene of desperation at the Sarajevo Airport as hundreds and hundreds of people gathered to try to get their small children, parents and other family onto Kikash military plains. Pleading with important-looking military officers, with their long lists of people’s names, to let them through––crying, begging, consoling, desperate. Through some miracle my parents managed to get me on one of those lists and on one of the planes. They gave me a few of our family photos (so that I wound not forget them and where I come from), my mom lovingly packed my sinus medication and some clothes, and told me that I will be back at the end of the summer when the war will be over, and with my English much improved. And so I went, with my grey, Yugoslav child passport (which in fact was no longer valid as we were living through the breakup of the country), 500 deutsche marks, my photos, and a book. As Kikash plane lifted off (in fact this was my very first time being on the plane) I sat on the floor of its enormous belly with a couple of hundred other people not really knowing where I was going and what will happen to me when I get there. I was all alone, a child who never travelled without her parents, going to some unknown future.

Three days later I was on a plane ride to London, England with another boy, a son of my parents’ friends. The two of us were going to his aunt who accepted to take me in for the short period until I was to return home to Sarajevo. As the airplane approached Heathrow airport I became very anxious and scared. We landed and I was immediately detained by the UK customs and immigration. I was held in an interrogation room for six hours. I had to take all my clothes out of my bag, they took my family photos and asked me about each person in the photo and where they were, they asked me about my sinus medication, about how much clothes I had, and why I was travelling, do I know what is happening to my country? They even asked me about Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the one book that I managed to take out of my parents’ library as I was leaving (the book I cannot bring myself to read again). It is hard to describe that feeling of being helpless, of being at the mercy of people in uniform, and especially being that way as a child. Like a caged animal my heart pounded, I was shaking, and I cried. I cried as all those things that the immigration officers looked through were really the last things that I could say were mine, these were the last remnants of my childhood, of my family life, and of my country, even those darn sinus pills… My entire life on display, my entire life in one suitcase, now an object of conversation for immigration officers, and evidence of my status.

Finally, I was let through, they decided that my friend’s aunt who waited for us was credible. This was my initiation into the life of a refugee. From that moment on, I moved with my suitcase from family to family, twice in London (during the 2 month stay there), and some ten times later on when I lived as a refugee in Croatia. At one point while still in London, I was supposed to be moved for the third time with an unknown woman, but when that did not work out the people with whom I was staying decided that I should be given over to the Child Services (as having a 15-year old in the house was too much for them). I couch-surfed most of the time, slept in peoples’ baby rooms next to their kids’ cribs, in their master bedrooms on the floor, in spare rooms, living rooms, all kinds of rooms. I learned to hold my pee in so that I would not have to be in the bathroom when owners of the house were in the house. I learned to take fast showers, I learned to eat when no one was looking (usually late at night). I learned how to walk without making a sound, how to use a hand towel, soap, shampoo, or kitchen utensils so that they would look like no one has used them. I learned to be sparing with creams, food, cookies so that it would not look like someone has eaten them. I learned to be invisible, how not to be noticed by police, by men, by security. I learned how to pack my bag quickly so that I can move out fast. I learned that refugees are not welcomed, that we are perceived as a burden, not just to the state and all its mechanisms, but often to extended families, friends, and even do-gooders who think that they can take in refugees into their home but cannot deal with someone actually living with them, taking their space.

I, however, also met some amazing people on the way, selfless, caring people like my mom’s friend who took me and my family in with her son for four months. Or like a doctor from the Doctors Without Borders who I met on the street and in our conversation I told him that my parents are doctors in Sarajevo and that I was not sure if they are dead or alive as all the phone lines were down and I did not speak to them in two months. He told me that he will find my parents as he was going back to Sarajevo and deliver my letter. And he did! (that was how my parents found out I was ok and alive).

Finally, I also learned that my parents were broken by the war, the strong, independent people I knew before April 1992 were now broken physically, mentally, and professionally. When both my parents came out of the besieged Sarajevo (my mom at the end of 1992, and my dad at the end of 1994) and when we lived as refugees in Croatia awaiting papers to immigrate to Canada or Australia, I saw my parents waiting in line for food donations, for refugee status, clothes, aid, they were lost and defeated, depressed. My dad has severe PTSD which was never dealt with. The defeat only continued when we came to Canada, when my parents had difficulty learning English, not being able to find a job, being too old to go to school (early-to mid 50s) but too young to retire, struggling; my father going to a local Food Bank getting food, working on construction site as a construction worker, my mom working with developmentally disabled adults and being attacked and bitten. Yes, standing there at the arrivals gate at Pearson Airport became an embodied performance of myself missing and my parents missing. I was that 15-year old kid again, trying to find myself.

Finally, another important thought I had at that moment of waiting for Tanja, as I had some confused looks from passersby, was that people could recognize the signs, they could recognize the ambiguity of what Tanja was stating. Several people stopped and asked what the sign was about. One man came around as asked where are these misplaced women? He was confused… I replied that it was a part of Tanja Ostojić’s art work relating it to refugees and migrant women, but also used the opportunity to address a more pressing Canadian context of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and the current inquiry into this tragedy (https://www.nwac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/

Fact_Sheet_Missing_and_Murdered_Aboriginal_Women_and_Girls.pdf). A female security guard came to me asking about the sign, she approached and said, ”You know you will get a lot of people asking about the sign,” “they will think you might have some answers for them…” Then she said, “you know, I am misplaced too…” These interactions with the security, passersby, people who wait for family and friends, and being at the airport, opened up a whole other conversation about invisibility of violence, of invisibility and visibility of women who are marginalized, who are placed at the mercy of governmental mechanisms, police, immigration, child welfare, welfare and unemployment services, ministry of Indigenous affairs, lawyers, immigration courts. It became clear then that this performance was placing an ethical and moral obligation on the passersby as it directly asked them to confront the question/statement on the sign I made for Tanja.

I write this as the Syrian refugees are fleeing their country just like I did 20+ years ago. I write this as Trump has barred people from entering US, I write this as frozen refugee claimants are crossing the US/Canada border at -40˚C, I write this as an official Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is just taking place 40+ years in, I write this as hundreds of unaccompanied minor children are prevented from entering UK (as the government stopped its program to help them,) I write this as women and children are still going missing––no questions asked… Tanja Ostojic’s performance which asks that question is therefore more important then ever. Standing in the crowd with a sign “Missing Women?” at this moment becomes an ethical and moral confrontation, one that troubles the age of invisibility. And at a time of alternative truths, the truth of those who are marginalized truth is the one that matters, and only one that cannot be erased in the swamp we call the Internet.

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Bojana Videkanić is an artist, art historian and curator. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who came to Canada as a refugee. Videkanić now lives in Canada where she teaches at the University of Waterloo and is a member of the curatorial board of the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival. 7a*11d festival, now in its 20th year, is one of the oldest and largest performance art festivals in Canada. The 7a*11d collective gathers over 20 international and national artists for each of its biannual festivals that takes place in the fall in Toronto: http://7a-11d.ca/ #7a11d2016

In the frame of Tanja Ostojić´s “Misplaced Women?” workshop hosted by Live Arts Development Agency London and Elena Marchevska, Teresa Albor realised a series of two very strong performances on displacement:

Packing up the large objects this morning, the bright orange life jacket (child size), the beaded scarf, the soft black little girl’s jacket. The smell— part smoke, part sweat, musty, human. Then the small objects—into the orange envelopes and then the zip lock bag, the bits and pieces of jewelry, including the fragile, fragile necklace, all tangled up, hopelessly tangled up.

I imagine,the women who are preparing to be evacuated from Aleppo this morning. They are packing up what little they can bring. Little girls (perhaps oblivious), teenage girls (dreaming of a future?), mothers (thinking of their children’s needs).

Clio looks good in red so I have bought her a red dress. Libby wants a particular book for her medical studies. I put the red dress in a black box and tie a red ribbon around it. I wrap the book in silver paper.

Someone else, once carefully packed the things I brought to Hackney Wick. All these objects once belonged to others, who took risks, who are hopefully somewhere where they feel safe, where they can dream, love, argue, fall out of love, make plans for the holidays.

The mall is busy. People are trying to find things to give to others. To make them smile, to show somehow—as impossible as it might be—how much they love them.

Please see Teresa Albor´s video of her performance in front of The Yard Theatre, Hackney Wick, London

The necklace is hopelessly tangled. I spend a good hour trying to ease the knots out. First I try to soften the snarl, gently easing the tiny chain into a loose little heap. Then I try to find the ends and see how long a length of chain is possible. But this makes the knot in the middle grow tighter and tighter. My fingers are numb from the cold, with little dents where I have been holding the chain. It seems maddeningly simple. I picture the untangled chain. I picture it hanging around the neck of a woman. She is smiling.

Tosha needs someone to babysit. It’s not easy being a single mother. She says it’s hard for her, now that she has a son, to watch the news, to see woman and children, the bombardment, their desperate flight.

I feel vulnerable sitting on the cement paving stone outside the Omega watch store. Someone else has the power. A man with a vest that says “security”. Calling out names: Amena, Yana, Ola, Liliane, Nour, Kamar, Lamma Dayoub, Qamar, Haya, Zeinah, Aya, Nooda, Ranim, Reem, Asil. Please be safe. What is the worst that can happen to me? What is the best thing that can happen to you?

The advantages of being our own audience: Working together, watching each other, making work for each other to see, acting as a magnet in public spaces to draw others in, acting as a protective shield when there’s some question about our “right” to make work in public. Being open to each other. Allowing everyone to be at a different point in his or her process. Observing each other and learning from each other.

Explaining to security: The art of just describing what is actually happening. “I am looking for something.” “She is wrapping a present.” The power (see above) of being able to focus on an action whilst someone else does the explaining.

Gut feeling + props: The need to allow your gut feeling to direct you, to give you ideas. To have the props but then let the action evolve. But to still be able to edit one’s self, and question one’s ideas, and not to incorporate every single idea. I have so many ideas.

Also, I wanted to say how much this workshop meant to me. This was a new way for me to work with these objects– the second piece, a way to put myself into the work, to make myself a bit vulnerable. It has given me plenty to think about. Once again, thanks to Tanja Ostojic for her warmth, patience, openness– for making us all feel so safe, and so encouraged as artists.

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Teresa Albor is London based performance and visual artist interested in how different groups of people negotiate the world. Her work is research-based and often involves broad collaboration. It can involve video/moving image, performance, installation, publication, community-based workshops, and forms of artist-led curation.

This Open Call for participants of Misplaced Women? performance workshop with Tanja Ostojić in London UK, December 13-14, 2016 hosted by Live Art Development Agency:

Participants of all backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome, but we particularly encourage those who are interested in issues of migration, representations of gender and art in the public realm.

The workshop is free and tea/coffee and lunch will be provided. We are able to contribute to travel costs for participants who are based outside London. The deadline for applications is Friday 4 November.

Outcomes will be presented to the public at the end of the second day of the workshop at the Live Art Development Agency and included on the Misplaced Women?project website.

Please reed about the project and see more application relevant details at the following link:

Marija Jevtić, Tanja Ostojić, Sunčica Šido and Nela Antonović performing Misplaced Women? inside the Info Park, Central Bus station Belgrade, Serbia, as one of the group performances in public spaces in Belgrade, conducted on October 29, 2015, during Misplaced Woman? workshop with Tanja Ostojić, thematising solidarity with the refuges on the Balkan route. Organised as a part of the From Diaspora to Diversity, Remont, Belgrade, Serbia. Photo: Lidija Antonović.

Responses by the participants of the Misplaced Women? workshop in Torry, Aberdeen:

On the 10th 0f March 2016, I co-organised and participated in the Misplaced Woman? Workshop with Tanja Ostojic. The Misplaced Women? workshop was organised as a part of the Aberdeen Festival of Politics 2016. During the workshop, participants had a chance to meet the artist Tanja Ostojic in a welcoming and casual settings. People could meet each other, share their immigration stories and expectations from the workshop over a cup of tea/ coffee. Then, the group went out to the streets of Torry in Aberdeen to enact the Misplaced Women? delegated performance. The performance involves unpacking of a bag or a suitcase in a public sphere and recalls the everyday experience of immigrants and refugees, but also of people who move from one city to another. It was not my first encounter with the Misplaced Women? performance and to me, as an immigrant, it always is a powerful experience. This time, the workshop Misplaced Women? made me reflect on mothers. On all the women who must juggle between motherhood and personal development or work. I am among these women too. Luckily, events like this with such inspirational and open minded people like Tanja Ostojic, Amy Bryzgel, and Renée Slater lit up my hope that women will have an opportunity to develop their potential as women. We do not need to act as men in order to have equal rights. We need understanding and equal rights to develop our full potential as women. Thank you for understanding and allowing me to bring my son with me and be the co-organiser and participant of this powerful and inspirational event! ……………………Marta Nitecka Barche

Misplaced Women?

Vulnerable and malleable, Increasingly strong, Out with hierarchy I catch my own self.

Resting only on the skin of others Causing warmth to emanate, I admire the view Streaming in from all angles.

Discarded, unfolded rush Takes place in the uncertainty. Here, there is no such pain Breathing in the entirety of all I have left.

Turn upper torso in search of the sun, Inside the wealth of abandonment, Increasingly hinders the Onset of the time.

And in concern of chaos, My weathered, kneaded soul Takes sanctuary of being, Free from all I own.

………..Angela Margaret Main

I really enjoyed the workshop, I felt vulnerable in the moment but I feel like it gave me confidence in my life. My favourite part of the workshop was watching Tanja perform at the bus stop.

………..Sarah Jackson

I liked the discussion that came from the workshop that Tanja did. Although I knew the issues surrounding the refugee crisis, I felt that listening to other participants talk was extremely emotional and powerful. You always hear these stories but when it’s right in front of you it isn’t a story any more.

As a part of the Aberdeen Festival of Politics 2016, the Misplaced Women? workshop conducted by Tanja Ostojić took place in Torry, an area of Aberdeen separated from the main port and city centre by the mouth of the river. It’s an area with its own distinctive geography. Connected to Aberdeen City centre by three bridges it is also somehow separate and with a strong relationship to the sea. It is easy to imagine it as a place with its own history and stories to tell. When I went to Torry for the first time I was struck by the smell of fish, the sound of the sea and the industrial spaces that dwarfed me as I rode my bike along the coast. I also noticed many different accents that confirmed Torry is a place that holds a diverse community of people who have found it more affordable to live in than other areas of the city. When I came to visit in March it was to meet with Tanja Ostojić in the local community centre and listen to other women speak on their experiences of migration and travel under the umbrella of the festival of politics, hosted by one of the local residents Renée Slater and co organised by Marta Nitecka Barche.

Our base was social centre of Torry, where we first met. We spoke a little bit about why we were there, sharing rich and personal stories around migration and other feelings connected to the idea of being misplaced. We also shared tea and biscuits. I was interested in questions of hospitality and politics in art. As well as this I had recently produced and supported performance art in Torry and wanted to feel what it was like to be on the other side, to perform. In thinking about hospitality I have spent some time trying to decide how it is possible to negotiate the power structures set up by the host/guest scenario. I had thought about the idea that possibly it is only those who have been ‘misplaced’ and know what it feels like to have lost a home that can offer hospitality. I felt that Tanja’s practice was intimately bound up these questions so I was happy that sharing food together, as well as stories of ourselves, round a table was the start of our journey. Tanja was a guest in Torry but also offered us the kind of hospitality that would make it possible to be brave and to move into the uncertain territory of performance art, a foreign land for many of us in the workshop.

After eating we walked out of the community centre, leaving the quiet streets in the area to descend down the hill to the shops and heart of Torry. We were lucky to have a sunny day and a view of the sea. The first place we choose to perform was the front steps of a public library.

Workshop participants in front of the Social Centre, Torry Aberdeen, UK

How did it feel standing outside the library? Angela unpacked things first from a cluttered, unkempt but well loved bag. She made a little line of things on the wall. It seem as though she was meeting a lot of these things for the first time or at least after a long time apart. There were things folded up in things, she stopped as if finished, then realized there was more to be done. I thought about unpacking. I stood on the edge of myself and the public space and paced back and forward. Other people began to unpack in different ways giving us a glimpse of their private worlds some perfectly neat, whilst other more complex. Someone else started to look for something; it became an accidental performance. I delayed. It felt too difficult to start. People started to look on, the librarian paused in the doorway unsure of what was happening. We started to move on. No harm done.

We made it to the bridge and a bus stop. Tanja took that moment to perform. One guy sat at the bus shelter with a group of friends, he watched as she began unpacking. A bus pulled up adding to the suspense. How long would it wait for her? What had been lost? People exchanged glances, questions were hanging in the air. The man on the bench made a decision, he would wait and see what was happening, wherever he was going he decided to delay. His friends left reluctantly without him. A small connection was made between strangers. Meanwhile the rhythm in Tanja’s performance picked up, the pace seemed to be more frantic, she turned items inside out, more stuff was laid out. Finally, at the bottom things were soup stained, a sticky mess. The performance slowed down, started to feel hopeless. Whatever she had been searching for seemed to slip away. She sat on the bench now looking out, spooning in mouthfuls of cold soup from the leaky container. I walked away to find a spot and grab a moment to also perform. I picked somewhere in the sunshine and without waiting dived into my own bag.

Tanja Ostojic´s performance

What are things? I hadn’t really thought too carefully about them before, these things I carry around. That day having taken the leap and begun to unpack, my things felt like little bridges, stretched between people. These objects we travel with make us feel safe, nourished and anxious in equal measure. Kirsty sat next to me unpacking. I decided to emphasize the vulnerability I felt. I piled things in a haphazard way, my papers started to catch in the wind. Kirsty smiled at my ‘filing system’, which was clearly, a broken system, a fragile, human system, under pressure and imperfect. But a system that nevertheless means something to me. I wanted to share what it meant, I was lucky enough to be with people I could share with. What does it mean to get everything out, to feel a little vulnerable but to support each other all the same? It felt good, like I had had a glimpse into another reality and like I would be a better host for having taken the journey.

One question I always had in my mind with regard to Misplaced Women? was: what about Misplaced Men? Of course, I am aware that Tanja’s work focuses on women because they are perhaps the most vulnerable in situations related to migrations, most notably with regard to trafficking, humiliation, and separation from families. And those who know Tanja’s work also know that she does not deal exclusively with women. Her film, Sans Papiers (2004, together with David Rych), tells the stories of many men being held in detention centres in Germany. So, when the opportunity arose, I decided to stage a Misplaced Man? performance in Aberdeen.

In the summer of 2015 I started organizing a conference that would involve both research talks and performances. I wanted to have a performance that would take place in the context of the presentation of papers, one that would disrupt the rhythm of the lectures. I immediately thought of Branko Milisković’s work, specifically his performance The Speech, which is part one of a two-part performance. Branko’s speech usually lasts around 4 hours, but given the time and space of the conference, and that this would be just one presentation of many, I asked him to do just 45 minutes of it. I wrote to invite him, and he agreed.

I knew, when I invited Branko, that as a Serbian passport holder, he would need a visa to the UK. As a US citizen (who has now naturalized in the UK), I knew all too well the complicated procedures for obtaining visas. And over the summer of 2015, a story broke about a group of performance artists from Georgia who were all denied visas to travel to the UK to participate in a performance art festival. Of course, I didn’t know the reasons behind that decision, but it was enough to give me pause about inviting Branko. But, I decided that I didn’t want to make an artistic decision based on nationality or bureaucratic procedures. That said, in inviting Branko, I was also aware that I was putting him in a situation that would be very trying for him—because although I could provide some help and support for his visa application, the burden was entirely on him to collect and submit the papers, to surrender his passport, and to wait for the decision as to whether his application deemed him worthy to enter and perform in the UK.

From the time that I invited Branko, on June 10, 2015, until the day that he received his visa on September 9, 2015, around one hundred emails were exchanged, regarding Branko’s visa. No art was discussed during this time. There was no discussion about the content of his speech, the logistics of his performance, how it would fit into the programme—nothing. It was not simply that we put off planning the performance until it was confirmed that he could come to the UK, but that there was simply no mental space or energy for either of us to do so. As the process went on, I felt worse and worse about putting Branko in that situation, as it was clearly very stressful for him, but wondered what choice I had: either I didn’t invite an artist that I thought was very talented and would make a valuable contribution to the conference simply based on the passport he held, or, I would undertake this task, knowing that it would put the artist under pressure.

In the end, we were successful, and from my view while I was glad we both took the risk, of course the process could, and should, have been easier and less stressful. But, because we are in the arts, we decided to use our power of expression to bring these issues into the public sphere in a different way. I proposed that Branko do a version of Misplaced Women? as a Misplaced Man? He is pictured here at Aberdeen Airport, just after having been cleared entry into the UK. Interestingly, he is standing in front of a picture of Dunnottar Castle, where I had taken Tanja when she was in Aberdeen in April 2015. Above him, a sign reads “currency exchange.” In fact, it was art that was Branko’s currency—his cultural capital is what enabled him to receive a visa to the UK and do his first performance there. I am glad to report that he is not a Misplaced Man.

On May 30, 2015, Amy Bryzgel (Lecturer in History of Art, University of Aberdeen), Adrienne Janus (Lecturer in English, UoA), and Suk-Jun Kim (Lecturer in Music, UoA) organized “The Art of Performance” at the University of Aberdeen May Festival, in the Linklater Rooms, King’s College, University of Aberdeen. The aim of the annual Festival is to give the general public the opportunity to get to know the research that the academics at the university are working on, and for the researchers to have the chance to engage with and share their work with the wider community. In the “Art of Performance,” Amy, Adrienne and Jun wanted to create an event that would explore notions of performance, performativity, and participation, by creating events that encouraged the attendees to participate, and also by demonstrating performance and giving the audience a chance to ask questions and discuss what they experienced.

Adrienne Janus performs Misplaced Women? Photo by MZ

There were three performances presented at The Art of Performance. The first was Tanja Ostojic’s delegated performance Misplaced Women?, which was performed by Amy Bryzgel, Marta Barche and Lisa Collinson, all of whom had attended Ostojic’s workshop at the University of Aberdeen on April 1, 2015, and they were also joined by Adrienne Janus. During the course of the performance another attendee of the workshop, whom the organizers didn’t know would be attending, also joined in and unpacked her bag. Next, Suk-Jun Kim and three of his students, Bea Dawkins, Mark James Dunmore and Simon Hellewell did a live-coding performance (Untitled, 2015), where they used the following four phrases as material which they then manipulated in their piece: “Where did you come from? What did you do today? What will you do today? How did you get here?” Finally, after a group discussion on the role of performance art and participatory art in Aberdeen, the audience experienced a Situationist International-inspired dérive, led by Adrienne and Marta, on the Elphinstone Lawn of the University of Aberdeen campus.

Amy Bryzgel performs Misplaced Women? Photo by MZ

Adrienne Janus performs Misplaced Women? Photo by MZ

Movement was the key concept that linked all three performance: movement, migration, how we move through space, how we occupy space, how we make space our own. Misplaced Women? raises questions not only about movement and migration, but also about where one’s private space ends and public space begins. The performance of the piece took place suddenly, unannounced, while the audience members were circulating the room, answering questions posed to them on posterboards, writing on post-it notes, eating candy (after Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations), so although it did not interrupted the flow of activity, it did form a disruption and attract the attention of those in the room. Perhaps at first the audience members may have thought that we were looking for something in our bags, but as each woman joined the activity, it became clear that something else was going on.

Misplaced Women? at the University of Aberdeen May Festival Photo by MZ

I, personally, became aware of the line between public and private that I had crossed when I began to empty out my wallet, and placed my identity cards and bank cards on the floor in front of me – all cards that contain important numbers that one is meant to keep secret, and the theft of which could cause significant problems for the owner of those cards. In the back of my mind I reassured myself that none of the people in the room would misuse that information, but whether or not this was true was not important. Rather, the fact that I experienced the feeling of exposing myself in the public space made the performance a poignant experience for me.

After the live-coding performance we all engaged in a discussion about the nature and role of performance art. One attendee said that she had actually wanted to join in the Misplaced Women? performance, but wasn’t sure if she could or should, and didn’t know if she had “permission.” In many ways, Misplaced Women? itself is about permission, and the role that permission plays in one’s ability to cross borders – who has permission to go where, and why.

About 35 people attended the Art of Performance, and all were thoroughly engaged and enthusiastic about witnessing and discussing performance, and even trying a bit of it themselves. Although Misplaced Women? was performed in the context of these other events, and not necessarily in a migration-sensitive space (although the University itself represents migration, with its diversity of faculty and students), I believe that viewing Misplaced Women? and hearing Marta’s discussion of it inspired others to think about their own migration stories, and the boundaries that they come across in their everyday lives, when they travel, and when they encounter individuals from other lands.

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Misplaced Women? is an ongoing art project by Tanja Ostojić, Berlin based internationally renowned performance and interdisciplinary artist of Serbian origin. The project consists of performances, performance series, workshops and delegated performances, ongoing since 2009, including contributions by international artists, students and people from divers backgrounds. Within this project we embody ... Continue reading →